Walter Rodney, African Studies, and the Study of Africa

Walter Rodney, African Studies, and the Study of Africa Jeffrey D. HOWISON, PhD Department of Sociology, Beykent University We believe that efforts to sustain African Studies as it has been historically constituted are bound to fail–and thus represent a very dangerous path to follow. Students and supporters of Africa would be well advised to think boldly and search for different paths. To move toward this requires rethinking the study of “Africa” and how it can be approached. – Michael O. West and William G. Martin1 Walter Rodney: An Intellectual and Biographical Sketch Walter Rodney (1942–1980) was a Guyanese-born historian and social activist who established himself not only as a seminal figure in the scholarly study of Africa, but in the larger context of the history of political engagement in the pan-African world. Perhaps the most important aspect of Rodney‟s life, among many, was his attempt to bring together these two components: academic writing and political commitment, which he understood as being inherently related and co-constitutive of the black freedom struggle worldwide. “And if I am an academic, and so long as I remain an academic, I must attempt to make the most important political input during those very many hours that I spend contributing to teaching or 1 Michael O. West and William G. Martin, “A Future with a Past: Resurrecting the Study of Africa in the Post-Africanist Era,” Africa Today, Vol. XLIV, No. 3 (1997), p. 310. 44 Ankara Üniversitesi Afrika Çalışmaları Dergisi Cilt 1 • Sayı 1 • Güz 2011 researching or whatever other aspects of academic life come into play.”2 A related hallmark of Rodney‟s life was his embracing efforts to unify different groups of black people, whether in a national or global context. Toward these ends, he consistently sought to engage the widest possible audience through his teaching, public speaking, and political efforts, and by gearing some of his most well-known writings more toward the public than toward an exclusively academic readership. Rodney was a pan-Africanist, which is to say that he saw an inherent connection between the peoples of African descent, a connection that was not based upon a fixed geography or even on skin tone, but upon a collective history and consciousness rooted in experiences of slavery, colonization, and oppression. Although his approaches and conceptual framework were shaped by older scholarly traditions and also constituted an important part of the nascent dependency school of the 1960s and 70s, Rodney‟s work remained outside the mainstream of institutionalized knowledge concerning the study of Africa, which was entrenched within the Africanist tradition, the dominant approach to the study of the continent in both the United States and Europe during the Cold War era. There was an important relationship between Rodney‟s political outlook and the social movements taking place within the context of his lifetime. Indeed his biography was well-coordinated against a larger backdrop of social and political change.3 Most immediately, the earliest influence on Rodney‟s political consciousness was related to his involvement, through his father, with the socialist politics of Guyana and the People‟s Progressive Party (PPP) during the 1950s. “As a youngster, I was given the sort of humdrum task to distribute party manifestos which one doesn‟t necessarily understand, but you come up against certain things … After a while, without knowing anything about class, I knew there were certain kinds of Guyanese into whose yards you did not go carry a PPP manifesto.”4 From this entry into the politics of ordinary Guyanese people, Rodney quickly acquired a sense of political solidarity with the masses. “So, even before he entered his teens, Rodney was already engaged in leafletting, 2 Walter Rodney, Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual, Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 1990, p. 35. 3 For more complete biographical information on Rodney see, among others: Rupert Lewis, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1998; Horace Campbell, “Walter Rodney: A Biography and Bibliography,” Review of African Political Economy, No. 18 (May–Aug., 1980), p. 132-137. 4 Rodney, Walter Rodney Speaks, p. 6. Jeffrey D. Howison 45 Walter Rodney, African Studies, and the Study of Africa attending party meetings and absorbing the thousands of hours of political discussions that went on in his home.”5 This deep “impulse toward socialism”, as Rodney would eventually call it, would remain evident throughout his political life and his scholarship. Outside of Guyana, Rodney‟s life coincided with two related historical conjunctures: first, the wave of national independence movements sweeping the former colonies of Europe in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. A child of the Second World War, Rodney‟s political and intellectual maturation dovetailed with the emergence of new states and their nationalist independence movements, and with the concomitant demise of European colonialism. As will be seen, the relationship of European colonialism and the historical development –or “underdevelopment” of the colonies would be the basis of his most celebrated work. The second conjuncture that coincided with Rodney‟s political and intellectual evolution was the civil rights movement in the United States. Though largely confined to the southern states in the immediate post-WWII period, by the middle of the 1960s the movement had transcended the South and was inherently related to a global consciousness that hinged upon the concept of black power.6 In short, the 1950s and 1960s, the era of Rodney‟s intellectual formation, was a key moment in the larger history of the pan-African world. As Viola Bly has concluded, “Sensing the urgency of the historical currents, [Rodney] brought his academic skills to bear in formulating a practical analysis of the problems facing the Black world.”7 When Rodney arrived at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica (UWI), in 1960, as a result of his receiving a Guyanese state scholarship, he already possessed an acute political, social, and historical consciousness. During his three years at UWI, he not only excelled in his studies, but engaged in political organization. In 1962 he traveled to Cuba 5 Vincent Harding, Robert Hill, and William Strickland, “Introduction,” Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Washington, D.C., Howard University Press, 1981, p. xiii. 6 An especially useful book among the voluminous works on the civil rights movement is Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, New York, The Free Press, 1984. For writings pertaining to Black Power as it was being articulated in the United States, a useful starting point is Marvin E. Gettleman (ed.), Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses, Greenwich, Conn., Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1968. Gettleman‟s volume contains the foundational texts by Malcolm X, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ossie Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and the critique of Black Power by Bayard Rustin. 7 Viola Mattavous Bly, “Walter Rodney and Africa,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. XVI, No. 2 (1985), p. 117. 46 Ankara Üniversitesi Afrika Çalışmaları Dergisi Cilt 1 • Sayı 1 • Güz 2011 and also founded the Students Democratic Party in Jamaica. By the following year Rodney completed his studies with honors and received another scholarship to pursue a doctorate in History at London University‟s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), a historic center for the institutionalized African Studies in the United Kingdom. During his subsequent time in London, Rodney met and studied with his greatest intellectual influence, the Caribbean Marxist historian C.L.R. James. James was one of three key influences in Rodney‟s approach to historical inquiry. C.L.R. James (1901–1989) was the first to celebrate the history and significance of Toussaint L‟Ouverture, the former slave who would lead the Haitian Revolution, which took place from 1791 through 1804. On the eve of the revolution, Haiti had been the jewel of the French colonial enterprise and the most profitable sugar colony in the world. In his groundbreaking book on the subject, published in 1938, James understood this event as foundational to the making of the modern world.8 James describes the Haitian slaves as agents in the shaping of their own destiny, acting as a conscious “proletariat”, a term that had traditionally been reserved for the white working classes of industrialized Europe and North America. The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any groups of workers in existence at that time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement.9 With this turn of phrase, James not only stands many of the old historical assumptions of slave revolts on their head (namely that they are spontaneous and uncoordinated affairs), he also makes a leap forward in the use of Marxist ideas by applying them to the slave plantation. Prior to James, the Haitian Revolution had been neglected in the historical scholarship on the Age of Revolution. Indeed, as Michel Ralph Trouillot has argued, the revolution and subsequent creation of a black republic in the Caribbean, the bastion of New World slavery, was an “unthinkable” event: it was utterly 8 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, (1938) 1989. For more recent scholarship on the Haitian Revolution, see Carolyn E. Fick, Making Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution From Below, Knoxville, Tenn., University of Tennessee Press, 1990; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap, 2005; Barış Ünlü, "200.

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